


The Fairies' Plan

by imaginary_golux



Series: Fractured Fairy Tales [5]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, F/M, Feral Forest Child Rey, M/M, Sleeping Beauty Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-06-20
Packaged: 2018-07-16 04:24:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7251931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imaginary_golux/pseuds/imaginary_golux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Princess Aurora Aurelia Amethyst Amaranth is cursed at her christening to prick her finger on a spindle before her eighteenth birthday and fall into a hundred years' sleep. The good fairies spirit her away to raise her in the woods, in safety.</p>
<p>At least, that was how it was <i>supposed</i> to work.</p>
<p>Beta by my Best Beloved, Turn_of_the_Sonic_Screw.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fairies' Plan

The important thing to remember about fairies, if you must interact with them, is that fairies fundamentally do not understand the concept of _time_. The idea that things must follow one another in an orderly fashion, that causes make effects and not the other way around, is a purely mortal invention, and it is only in the mortal world that seconds and minutes and hours and days and weeks and months and years march along in a tidy sort of fashion, each after the other like beads on a string. The fairy world has a very strange sort of relationship with time, as anyone who has read any fairy tales knows, so that a mortal who spends an evening dancing beneath a fairy hill may find that their night of revelry has cost them a year and a day, or seven years, or a hundred; and then again, the lucky mortal who gains the favor of some fairy lord or lady may spend a lifetime learning their craft beneath the hill, and step out again to find that mere hours or days have passed beneath the mortal sun. Fairies, even the very best and kindest of them, do not understand how the mortal world counts time and how time rules the mortal world - indeed, unfortunately for the mortal folk, it is often the worst and cruelest of the fairies who best comprehend the way that mortal years spool out and are wound up again.

This is all in the way of trying to explain why, when the Princess Aurora Aurelia Amethyst Amaranth (called, at her own insistence, merely ‘Rey’ by those who knew her) was left in a cottage in the middle of a very wide forest, all alone, at the tender age of five. She was not meant to be alone, you understand, and for the first five years of her life she spent very little time without one or another of her caretakers hovering about her - literally hovering, as often as not, for they were, as you may by now have guessed, fairies, three of the kindest and sweetest of that variegated clan, the three who had sworn to protect her from the terrible fate which fell upon her at her christening, when the evil fairy Snoke laid upon her a cruel and cunning curse: that before her eighteenth birthday, she should prick her finger on a spindle and fall into a deep and dreamless sleep, from which for a hundred years she should not wake, unless true love should cure her.

The three good fairies, who had blessed her with beauty and grace and intelligence, did their best to break the curse when it was set, but it is an unfortunate fact that evil fairies always do seem to have more power than the good ones, for whatever reason that may be, and even the best efforts of the three good fairies together could not take the curse from the princess. The king her father proposed, in a panic, that he would ban all spindles from the kingdom forever; but wiser heads prevailed, and instead the three fairies promised to keep the princess safe for all her childhood, to raise her to her majority in secret security, and to keep from her all knowledge of spindles. So they bore the little princess off to a cottage in the woods, hidden by every sort of spell and safeguard, and deep enough in the forest fastnesses that even the most daring hunters never ventured there, and there they raised her.

I say they raised her; and this is true enough for the first five years of her young life, during which they doted upon her and hovered about her and saw to it that she lacked for nothing she desired, taught her to speak and read and sew and dance and other such lessons, insofar as such things may be taught to one so young. But in her fifth year, there came notice that a certain matter, important to fairies but incomprehensible to mortal folk, was to be debated in the halls of the Queen of the Fairies, Titania the Wild; and the fairies agreed that it could hardly be dangerous to step away from the mortal world for a little while - a few moments, perhaps, a scant second or two of mortal time. They admonished their small charge to be careful and not to burn herself upon the stove, and left her playing with the wolf-cubs which she had recently befriended.

I said, I think, that fairies do not understand mortal time; and that their own realm lies diagonally to our own, so that it touches but lightly, and not in any predictable manner. So. The fairies _meant_ , I am quite sure, to be gone no more than a single eyeblink, no matter how convoluted the debate should grow, how many endless dreamlike days of fairy time it should demand; but alas, their wisdom was not quite as comprehensive as their kindness, and though the little princess waited patiently, weeping only a little as the skies grew dark, they did not return that day. Nor did they step from the air to dry her tears the next day, nor the next; and as the days turned to weeks, the little princess realized that she had been left quite alone in the middle of the forest.

Now she was a brave child, as well as being beautiful and graceful and clever, and that courage was all her own and no fairy-given gift. So when she had begun to truly believe that her fairies would not return in good time, she dried her tears and set her jaw and resolved that she would wait as long as it might take for her protectors to recollect her need and come to find her.

She was, I have said, only five; but she was a precocious little thing, strong and healthy as a wolf-cub herself, with the fey-given cleverness which is not quite like mortal wit, and she had observed her guardians carefully as they cooked and cleaned - which they did the mortal way, as often as not, because it amused them to do so - and so she made shift to care for herself and did, it must be said, quite well at it. By the time she was ten, she was as woods-wise as the oldest and canniest hunter, and she was quite a good plain cook besides. (The fairies had, in the overenthusiastic way of fairies, used some of their powers to make sure that the flour-bin and the butter-dish and the spices and all other necessary things never ran out, and so little princess Rey had all the things she needed to feed herself, though meat she had to hunt for herself.) She had learned, moreover, from the wolves and the bears, the deer and boar and the rare solitary wild cats, to hunt for herself and to defend herself against those creatures which did not know that she was fairy-touched, and she bore over her shoulder always the long stave which was her best weapon, and with which she could strike as hard as a bear or vault an obstacle as lightly as a deer. She knew, as the fairies had promised, nothing of spinning and only little of sewing, and her clothing, it must be admitted, was both ragged and ill-made, but she was lean and healthy as the wolves who were her companions, and she knew every inch of her forest home as well as she knew her own name - better, in fact, for the years had taken the long rhythm of her royal name from her, and she called herself only ‘Rey,’ and knew no other.

Rey was, on occasion, curious about the other creatures called ‘humans’ which lived outside the woods and only rarely ventured in, and as she grew older she took to shadowing the hunters who dared enter her domain, ghosting along behind them as silent as a shadow, taking careful note of the way they walked and spoke, the clothes they wore and the weapons in their hands. They fascinated her, but she never quite dared speak to any of them. She had not spoken to another human-shaped person since she was five, after all, and while she talked often and volubly to the animals who were her near-constant companions, that was only partially in words, and she was not entirely sure she remembered how to speak to a human person, how to match words to thoughts in a way another of her own kind might understand.

This state of affairs continued until she was sixteen, lean and dangerous and beautiful as sunrise. In her sixteenth year, lurking near the forest edge, she saw a young man, not much older than herself - she guessed, not being particularly practiced at assessing human age - fleeing desperately into the forest, and nearly on his heels a band of armored men behind a black-caped figure who set the hair rising on her arms in the same way the rabid wolf she’d had to kill some years before had done. She acted, it must be said, on impulse, but any person chased by such a man, so far as Rey could tell, deserved her aid; and so she leaned out of concealment as the young man pelted past and beckoned to him.

“This way,” she hissed. “I’ll keep you safe.”

The young man took her at her word, and followed her deep and deeper into her forest; and she used all her skill to hide them, doubling back and splashing through streams and taking the tree-routes that the squirrels had showed her, until the greatest tracker in the world could not have found them; and at the last she led the young man to her cottage, ringed about with its protective spells, and there, at last, his strength gave out.

He sat down on the wood-chopping stump outside her door and stared at her, and Rey returned the favor. He was the first human she’d really gotten a chance to properly _look_ at, without worrying about concealing herself, and she took the golden opportunity for what it was.

He was, she decided, very appealing to look at. His skin was very dark, far darker than hers, and he had kind eyes and, when he smiled, a very beautiful smile. “Thank you for saving me,” he said after a few moments. “I’m Finn.”

“I’m Rey,” she said. “Why were they chasing you?”

Finn grimaced and shrugged. “I disobeyed Master Ren, and then I helped one of his enemies escape. I’d do it again, too - he wanted me to kill unarmed villagers, and I _won’t_ do that.”

“Ugh,” said Rey, wrinkling her nose. “He sounds awful. Well, he can’t find you here. You can stay with me, if you like.”

“Thank you, Rey,” said Finn, smiling, and that, as the saying goes, was that.

Finn was, it must be said, a very useful addition to Rey’s tiny household. He told her, when she asked, everything he knew about the world outside the forest, the countries which surrounded it and their ruling families, the way most humans lived. He taught her, somewhat inadvertently, which of the things she had always taken for granted were _not_ normal, by being astonished at the ever-refilling flour bin and the wild animals which were her dearest friends. And so a year rolled by, and much of another, and Rey and her Finn became inseparable, closer than kin, such that they could move in perfect unison and seemed to know each other’s minds as well as their own.

And then one day - a day much like any other in late spring - the silence of the deep forest was broken by the sound of horns and drums, and through the trees came marching the heralds and royal guardsmen of the king Rey’s father, and hailed her as a princess, bowing and kneeling and doing due reverence to her, and explained that the following day would be her eighteenth birthday, and her royal father and mother wished, with all their hearts, to celebrate that day with their beloved daughter.

“How can they love me if they’ve never known me?” Rey asked, but a king’s edict is a king’s edict, and so to her bewilderment and dismay she was bundled onto a horse - rather clumsily, having never learned to ride - and only her violent protestations convinced the royal guards to allow Finn to accompany her to the castle which she had never dreamed of calling home.

The king and queen were rather dismayed to learn, from their ill-dressed and unmannerly daughter, that the fairies who had promised to raise her as a princess should be raised had vanished thirteen years ago, and that she had raised herself in wild solitude until very recently, and that the handsome young man who stood at her shoulder was her dearest friend, whose company she could not do without. There were a number of princes in attendance at the court, waiting eagerly for the young princess’s eighteenth birthday, in hopes of winning her heart and hand (and her father’s kingdom into the bargain), and the king and queen were not pleased to think that their wayward daughter might have chosen instead to bestow her heart and hand upon an unknown and unnoble man.

This, you should note, is why it is not always wise to trust the fairy folk. They will not break their word _willingly_ , nor knowingly, but what a fairy promises and what the fairy actually _provides_ are sometimes as different from each other as chalk from cheese. In this case, the fairies had promised that Rey would be safe, would grow up beautiful and graceful and clever and unharmed. And that was true. But they had neglected to promise that she would be _biddable_ , and that, indeed, she was not. She agreed, after quite a lot of argument, to attend the ball which had been arranged, and even to dance - though her parents neglected to ask _whether_ she could dance, which was perhaps a pardonable oversight - but she insisted, quite stubbornly, that Finn be allowed to attend with her, and her parents could in no wise dissuade her. And so it was that the Princess Rey - Aurora Aurelia Amethyst Amaranth, who answered to none of her long and lovely names - came down to her eighteenth-birthday ball on the arm of a handsome young man who looked at her like she was the sun and the moon and the stars together, and more than one of the princes assembled there cursed their fates that they stood not in his place.

But one of the young princes looked at the man beside the princess not with envy but with sudden and delighted recognition, and when the dancing had begun, made his way through the crowds to the handsome young man’s side, and greeted him as one does an old and dear friend, or more than friend. And Finn threw his arms around the prince’s neck, almost weeping with joy and relief, and clung to him. So there was much confusion, for a little while, until Finn finally managed to explain to Rey that this was Poe Dameron, of the kingdom of Yavin, whom Finn had saved from Master Ren and his Knights two years ago; and then the prince praised Finn’s courage so highly, and spoke so well of him, that he won over the princess Rey’s affections also, and she smiled at him and agreed to dance with him, and all through that long night the three of them were merry, and their laughter rang in the crowded hall like bells.

And for a little while, Rey’s royal parents thought they had escaped the curse.

But on the stroke of midnight a hush fell over the whole vast hall, and into the silence stepped the wicked fairy, Snoke, bearing a spindle in his hand; and he stood before Rey and her companions and laughed with a sound like the breaking of the world. And Rey said to him, “Who are you and what do you want with me?”

The wicked fairy replied, “I have come, as I promised, to cast you into a sleep like death, there to linger for a hundred years, o mortal child. Come; take the spindle and have done, for you have escaped me long enough.” And there was power in his words such as few mortals could withstand.

But Rey was fairy-touched, and stubborn, and brave, and she stepped back and shook her head and said, “I’ll do no such thing; I do not know you, but if you wish to be my enemy, I will set myself against you, and I shall defeat you, though you be strong as strong.”

Then Snoke laughed, and gestured to the hall full of guests, and Rey looked about and saw that there were briars growing on the walls, thorned and vicious vines, and the wicked fairy said, “If my curse goes awry, mortal child, every soul within this hall will die, and my briars will grow strong in their blood.” And he held the spindle out, and its point gleamed like a star.

And before Rey could do anything - before anyone in the hall could move - Finn stepped forward and took the spindle from Snoke’s hand, pricking his finger upon it, and fell to the ground at Rey’s feet, bound in a sleep like death. Rey cried out with anger as he fell, and snatched an iron candelabrum from the table near at hand, and struck the wicked fairy with it with all the strength in her arm - and she was strong from many years running wild in the forest, and there was the speed of the wolf and the force of the bear in her blow - and iron, as you may know, is deadly to fairies. So when she struck the wicked fairy, he screamed so loud that many fainted at the sound, and then he burnt away to ash and gone, and all his briars with him.

But Finn slept on.

That was, as you may have already guessed, the end of the party; indeed, many of the young princes left the kingdom entirely that very night - or early morning, as it was - and took with them tales of the wild princess and the misfired curse. The king and queen were very glad to find their daughter hale and well, but it must be admitted that they first suggested that Finn should be placed in a quiet room to sleep his hundred years away, as _he_ was not a prince nor a princess, no one of note at all.

Rey’s fury at this suggestion was as bright and dangerous as a forest fire, and the long and short of the argument that ensued was that the prince, Poe Dameron, sent for his carriage, and brought away from that kingdom both Finn, sleeping soundly through the whole commotion, and the princess Rey, who swore upon the iron candelabrum that slew her tormentor that she would never again set foot within her parents’ kingdom till they made apology to Finn. And at length the three of them came to the kingdom of Yavin, and Poe’s father and mother made them welcome, and set a room aside for Finn; and Rey, who was not accustomed to castles, slept on the broad windowsill of Finn’s room, so that she could watch him through the night.

And so many days passed, and Poe came each day to sit beside Finn for many hours, and told Rey often and adoringly of the day Finn saved his life, rescued him from the clutches of the cruel man who’d captured him; and Poe told other tales as well, of his own life and of the kingdom he loved, of his family and the adventures of his wilder years, and Rey listened and laughed. And when Poe was silent, Rey told her own stories, of the day she rescued Finn and their years in the forest together, of her childhood among the wolves and wild things of the forest, and Poe watched her with bright eyes like stars.

And, of course, they spoke often and often of the curse, and how it might be broken; for it tore at their hearts to see Finn lie so still beneath the coverlet.

At last, however, Poe unearthed an old and forgotten letter, which an ambassador from Rey’s father’s court had written eighteen years ago, describing the curse laid upon the infant Aurora Aurelia Amethyst Amaranth at her christening - and the cure.

“True love,” said Rey then, thoughtfully. “I know you love him, Poe - it is in every word you speak, and every look you give him.”

“I know _you_ love him, wild Rey,” Poe replied. “It is in every movement of your hands, in every tale you tell.”

“Then we must both kiss him,” Rey said - which is only logical, you know, and she was fairy-clever, after all; the fair folk do not think as mortals do. And Poe had learned to love the woods-wild princess in the months that they sat vigil by Finn’s bed, and made no protest to her plan.

So it was that they bent over the bed together, and pressed their kisses to Finn’s lips, and as they stood again, hands clasped in hope and comfort, Finn smiled, and his eyes opened, and he woke to find that he was loved.

And so it was that the prince Poe Dameron of Yavin married the princess Aurora Aurelia Amethyst Amaranth, called Rey by all who knew her, and married _also_ the young knight Finn, who was called ever after the Royal Shield, for that he had saved the prince from captivity and the princess from a curse; and when Poe became king he made Rey his queen and Finn his prince consort, and they ruled wisely and well, and for all I know they are ruling there still.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a tumblr, imaginarygolux.tumblr.com! Come squee about fairy tales and TFA!


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